The present invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for electronically counting the number of objects that travel across and make contact with a sensing surface and more particularly to a method and apparatus for electronically counting the number of people within a particular area by sensing the footsteps of the people traveling across a sensor mat at the entrance/exit of the area and computing the number of people and their direction of travel.
For various commonly known reasons related to marketing, crowd control, and crowd monitoring, it is desirable to record the number of people passing through an opening, such as a doorway, into an interior space, such as a department in a department store. Furthermore, it is often desirable to maintain a running total of the number of people in a particular area.
The present invention provides a pedestrian traffic counting system for counting the number of people traveling into and out of an area. The net flow of people may be calculated from the count of people entering the area and the count of people exiting the area. The counting system includes a sensor surface or mat having a plurality of zone locations with pressure sensitive switches for producing contact event signals when objects, such as human feet, make contact with the zone locations, a microprocessor connected to the sensor mat having software for analyzing the contact event signals, and a two-channel counter including an "in" count register for recording the number of people entering the area and an "out" count register for recording the number of people exiting the area. The software controls the microprocessor, causing it to scan the sensor mat to detect contact events and analyze groups of contact events corresponding to pedestrian traffic sequences. The traffic sequences are analyzed by evaluating the temporal and spatial relationships between the contact events using predetermined criteria. When a traffic sequence corresponds to the criteria associated with a person traveling over the sensor mat in the "in" direction, the microprocessor adds one to the "in" count register of the counter. Likewise, when a traffic sequence corresponds to the criteria associated with a person traveling in the "out" direction, the microprocessor adds one to the "out" count register of the counter.
Other features of the present invention will become apparent upon consideration of the following description of exemplary embodiments and the accompanying drawings.